Golden Goose Awards Honor Strange Science

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Politicians have their pick of strange-sounding studies when they
want to call for cuts to science spending.

A
duck genitalia researcher was forced to defend her work
earlier this year. Before that, there was the infamous case of
the "shrimp on a treadmill" study.

To combat wide-eyed allegations about useless
government-supported research, a group in Washington, D.C.,
on Thursday (Sept. 19) gave out the
Golden Goose Awards to seven researchers whose federally
funded studies, though they may sound obscure, have led to
practical breakthroughs.

"It's easy to mock researchers, but we couldn't live without
their brilliant breakthroughs," Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), the
creator of the award, said in a statement. "Today's awardees gave
unexpected gifts to mankind. Fiscal discipline is important, but
without science we'll never see the next discovery." [ The
10 Weirdest Animal Discoveries ]

Lloyd Shapley, Alvin Roth and David Gale (who is being honored
posthumously) were bestowed a Golden Goose Award for their work
on theoretical mathematical algorithms — which at first, were
aimed at finding a formula for compatible marriages.

The Gale-Shapley algorithm, developed in the 1960s, tackled the
so-called stable marriage problem. It showed how to match equal
numbers of men and women with a spouse so that no two people of
the opposite sex would prefer each other over their partner. But
the formula also could be used to ensure stable matches in real
markets, which Roth helped to show.

Their collective research, though decades apart, has led to
mathematical models used around the country to help place
graduating medical students in their hospital residencies, match
kidney donors with compatible patients and put students in the
right schools in urban districts. Shapley and Roth were awarded
Nobel Prizes in Economic Sciences in 2012, but Gale, who died
in 2008, was not eligible for the prestigious award.

John Eng, a medical researcher and practicing
physician, also received a Golden Goose Award for studying the
poisonous venom produced by the
Gila monster, a sluggish lizard found in the Southwest, with
funding from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Eng's work led
to a drug called exenatide, which is used by millions of
diabetics to prevent complications like blindness, kidney failure
and nerve damage.

"Medicine from monsters and venom may sound like a
science-fiction novel, but it's a real-life breakthrough," Rep.
Cooper said in a statement. "Dr. Eng's research shows that we
can't abandon science funding only because we don't know where it
might lead. Just ask millions of diabetics whose lives have been
improved by his discovery."

Another set of Golden Goose Awards went to Thomas Brock and
Hudson Freeze, who discovered a heat-resistant
bacteria at Yellowstone National Park, using money from the
National Science Foundation. Strangely enough, their findings led
to the discovery of the polymerase chain reaction, which can
amplify DNA and has enabled genetic sequencing and genetic
fingerprinting.

The Golden Goose Awards, now in their second year, were given out
by a bipartisan group of Members of Congress in a ceremony on
Capitol Hill. The award's name is a reference to
the Aesop
fable "The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs," and is also
a play on the "Golden Fleece Award," given out by the late Sen.
William Proxmire (D-Wis.), on research he considered wasteful
spending.